From Packets to Proxies: A Backend Engineer’s Journey from the OSI Model to Envoy

Envoy Proxy — the cloud-native proxy powering modern service meshes and microservices architectures. Introduction Every HTTP request you make travels through an invisible maze of layers, proxies, and load balancers before reaching its destination. That GET /api/users you fired off? It was encrypted, segmented, framed, converted to electrical signals, routed across networks, reassembled, decrypted,…